Whenever we’re doing a new project with a new client its important to really scout out your perfect product owner. This really helps to drive the product to a success.

In order to find where they are hiding you first need to understand the kind of requests they could get from a development team. Some things that the PO could get asked from the (tech)team:

  • Can you prioritize the backlog for me?
  • Can you fetch me some new stories for the supplier stakeholder?
  • Can you retrieve me an excel list of all employees with email and photo so can we can import it.
  • What is the reason that the company talks to the customer, can’t the repair man do it themselves?
  • What has more prio/business value? The front-facing website or the mailing list functionality?
  • What has your organization used before you used CRM PRO? Why didn’t it work?
  • User story 5 is a bit epic, can you break them down?
  • User story 6 has no value, can you ask the original stakeholder why he’s doing it this way?
  • We’re not completely sure about this flow can you double check if these screens are okay for the help-desk employee?
  • Can you arrange a call with 5 help-desk employees so they explain their struggles to us?

That boils it kinda down to this traits:

  • Laser focused vision of what business value needs to be delivered, regardless of the how.
  • Enthusiastic and motivated.
  • Open minded. open to different approaches.
  • Ability to listen to what the organization has to to say and distill the needs from it.
  • Good reputation in the company being helpful, open, non-judgmental, easy to speak with.
  • Ability to inspire people and translate the vision of the product.
  • Ability to get leverage the tribal knowledge of the organization to get things done.
  • Knows what knowledge what people within the organization have and knows how to extract, centralize and converge it.
  • A getting things done mentality and doer.
  • Fully backed and trusted by the sponsor of the project.
  • Willingness to go in depth with the tech team and come up with solutions or explore options and make decisions.
  • Available at any time for the team for questions.

I’ll add some more traits later.